I actually had to look up what the 57342G was referencing. Had no idea you could gameshark the game to get to that chest!
(For anyone else unfamiliar with it, there's a counter behind Truce Inn that is unreachable by normal means. If you can sneak past using a cheat, it contains 57342G.
All that being said...
I know that that would translate to something along the lines of go-nana-san-yon-ni, or 五七三四二. I'm not sure what would make a lone "g" sound in Japanese, as I'm only through hiragana and partway through learning katakana. Very little kanji at this point. Regardless, as far I know, all Japanese phonetics come from vowels tied to a parent sound (for example, I know of
ga, ge, gi, go, gu but nothing else that would tie directly to a lone g). I don't know any kanji, but I wouldn't think kanji go into that sort of phonetics. A super quick Google-fu didn't turn up anything.
Japan can have the same word (or equivalent word) with various spells between katakana, hiragana, and/or kanji.
Shi (死) means death in Japanese and has roughly 20 variants that I could found. None of them even remotely sound like the same phonetic pronunciation of the numbers. The closest would be
ishi (一死), which sort of sounds like the number 1 (
ichi). I looked up Konami and also tried to see if there was some nickname or alternate pronunciation that could tie back to the phonetics of the numbers. No joy.
I also found that pretty much the only proponent of this rumor is that Kenny. The same Kenny from the screenshot. Kenny Gorman.
I'm not sure how true this is...
But wait. Just as I was about to post this, I got a lead that helped me rethink this.
Someone named Alexander Kelly does claim that:
The 57342G is likely a Japanese phrase encoded in the numbers. "5" can be transliterated as "GO" or "KO", "7" would be "NA", "3" would be "MI" or "SA" or "SAN", "4" would be "YO" or "SHI" or "YON", and "2" would be "NI" or "FU". Not sure what they combine to, although the first three digits seem like "KONAMI"
And I realized that I was looking at it wrong. This could very well be word play.
5 =
go, (五), which, as a phonetic letter is ご... if you remove the two little lines on the upper right, the phonetic letter becomes
ko (こ)
7 =
nana (七七) or shichi... cut it in half and you are left with just the katakana 七 (
na)
3 =
san (三), which, in looks awfully similar to ミ in katakana (or み in hiragana), which is
miAdd to that we've already established that the number 4 translates to
yon (四)... but I realized that 4 can also be called shi. Shi can also mean death, as discussed above.
This theory is starting to take form, yes?
Finally, the number 2 is
ni (二), or
futsu/futatsu (二つ) in native Japanese, or fu for short. Fu means "to mark" in kanji (符).
So with some definite reading between the lines, this really could spell:
Konami marked for death, or "death to konami." It requires some finagling, but it could be true with some word play.
Now, I reviewed the credits for Chrono Trigger and the head programmers are Katsuhisa Higuchi and Keizo Kokubo. They both worked for Square Enix in the SNES era and Higuchi even worked on Chrono Cross' battle system. I tried to see if either of them used to work for Konami and maybe held a grudge, but I couldn't find anything conclusive.
More to come...
EDIT: Well, I found Higuchi-san's Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/katsuhisa.higuchi?lst=100008801403964%3A100002408123230%3A1524507851.
Dude, I feel like a mega-stalker. Good thing I don't have a Facebook or else I'd be seriously considering reaching out to him.
Fuck that, we totally could reach out to him and ask him if he could give us an interview! A Chrono Compendium exclusive! How awesome would that be for the Chrono Compendium?!?! Although it doesn't look like his Facebook has been active in 4 years or so.
